Appeals court upholds life sentence in Cleveland drive-by killing

Brandon Swain’s family and the Cleveland neighborhood tied to the July 26, 2021 drive-by shooting got a final answer this week: Derrick Harris will remain in prison for life. The Mississippi Court of Appeals upheld Harris’s sentence for first-degree murder and a concurrent 20-year term for aggravated assault, ending his challenge to the conviction that followed the Roosevelt Street shooting in Cleveland, Mississippi.

The ruling leaves in place the punishment imposed by Bolivar County Circuit Judge Charles E. Webster on December 13, 2024. The appellate panel, Chief Judge Barnes and Judges Crystal Westbrooks and McDonald, said Harris lost the only issue he tried to raise on appeal because his defense team agreed to the disputed jury instruction three times in open court. Because of that, the court reviewed the claim only for plain error and found no reversible mistake.

Harris had argued that the instruction, which mixed self-defense language with accidental-shooting language, may have confused jurors. Judge Westbrooks, writing for the court in the case docketed as 2025-KA-00084-COA, rejected that argument and left the verdict and sentence intact. For Cleveland residents who remember the case as a bystander killing, the decision underscores how appellate outcomes can turn on preservation rules as much as on the facts of the shooting itself.

Those facts were grim. The court said the violence began after Harris learned that his 16-year-old cousin, Cedric Hall, had been robbed at gunpoint by Jakavion Johnson. According to the opinion, Johnson stole Hall’s gun, then robbed him of his wallet and phone. Harris got into a car with Cedric Hall, 14-year-old Monterious Cox and friend Malachi Butler as the group drove around Roosevelt Street looking for Johnson. Butler fired first from the vehicle, then Harris crashed into a mailbox, took Butler’s larger gun and kept shooting in the same direction.

Swain was struck and killed by a stray bullet. Frederick Johnson was also shot twice in the back while trying to move his family to safety inside his home, a detail that shows how quickly retaliatory gunfire in a neighborhood can turn innocent bystanders into victims. The case now stands as another reminder in Cleveland that one act of revenge can ripple far beyond the people who started it.